“‘Managing’ time starts from the premise that your workload is going to be what it’s going to be, and the best you can do is keep it ‘manageable,'” one Google employee explained this week. Here’s his approach to breaking your work duties into four “quadrants” in order to create a more well-designed workday.

Technical chops and people skills are inching into closer proximity in today’s workplace, according to a recent Bentley University study. This week we learned which changes are bringing that about and what it takes to stay versatile.

Researchers at the University of Colorado–Boulder asked 13 office workers to do the impossible: go cold turkey off email for five workdays. Here’s what it felt like to be off the grid for a week–and what it was like returning to an untended inbox afterward.

Not only does no one like a nine-paragraph email, no one reads it. Sometimes it’s actually harder to craft a shorter note, but with these three simple rules in place, you can start reaping the benefits in your workday and even your career.

Most to-do lists clump a wide range of tasks together–from the long-term and difficult to the quick but neglected. This week author David Nour showed us how to straighten things out by ranking our to-do items by their relative urgency, seriousness, and likelihood of worsening if ignored.